I started off with Windows Media Player 11 and iTunes. However in my review of iTunes I admitted I personally didn’t use it for myself. I decided after posting that, that it would be a good idea to test it out properly for myself, so I downloaded iTunes 7.7.

After playing around with it I came the conclusion that while it’s good if you have an iPod Nano and not a lot of music, its pretty dodgy for any large music libraries and the tagging is hit and miss. Performance on Windows is also pretty shocking, even worse then WMP but I did like the simple and clear interface.

One of the best things about iTunes is that there are a large number of extensions, plugins and addons which can provide some great extra functionality. Aside from that I certainly wasn’t converted.

Media Monkey

Today I decided to cover MediaMonkey, the popular music tagging solution and management software. It’s available in a free and ‘gold version. The free version has plenty of functionality, although the upgrade is good as well.

Media Monkey is the best music file tagger, hands down. If I’m wrong about that, then let me know because I’d love to see what your alternative is. Although I use Media Monkey for all my music tagging, it’s not my favourite player for general music browsing and playing.

It has a lot of great features, but I find the interface extremely unintuitive and takes too much mucking around to get it working to my satisfaction, including finding new themes. Performance however is fantastic, the best out of all the media players I’ve used. It handled my 10 000 track library with ease.

It also has the biggest feature list, overwhelmingly so in fact. The more you use Media Monkey the more about it you’ll discover, in fact I would say it has quite a learning curve compared to other software, although you’ll appreciate it as you find more and more features.

Extensions are available through Scripts. This provides the ability to add some great functions to Media Monkey, but it’s also not the easiest for new users. There is no one directory of scripts, instead you’ll have to Google or scour the official forums. It would be nice to see a Firefox addons style directory added to Media Monkey’s webpage.

For me personally, the interface is what lets it down. I’d love to see the next release focus on this above all else. When compared to WinAmp, iTunes, WMP and even Songbird Media Monkey really feels quite ‘clunky’ and unintuitive, great though the software is.

To conclude, if you need one piece of software to completely organise your music, Media Monkey is the application to do it.

What are your opinions?

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I’m sure we all have our favourites, so I would love to hear exactly what it is that has made you choose what you have. You may use more then one, I know I do. I also understand there is a great number of media players, so I’ve restricted this to just ‘music jukeboxes’, or music management software. I plan to work my way through all the major contenders, starting with Part 1 (WMP and iTunes) today.

I have narrowed down the list so the software must include several criteria:

• Reasonable level of popularity
• Includes all basic music jukebox features such as:
  • ripping and burning of music
  • music library
  • music tagging
  • Music categorisation
• Has had at least one non-beta, stable release
• Under active development

For these reasons some players have been excluded, such as Songbird, which is still working towards release 1.0, foobar2000 and VLC popular though they are.

Apologies also for a primarily Windows focused list, I am after all a Windows user (but also dual-booting Ubuntu on occasion) so it’s what I know.

Windows Media Player

The classic. Not too popular these days with music fans, although personally I don’t think it’s too bad. Much of its popularity is due to bundling with Windows, that’s granted. However it’s still one of the better music management applications.

It has a attractive, easy to use interface suited for beginner users. Once you find your music collection growing the library filtering options will begin to become more limiting. I still find it a fairly attractive way for my music library to be displayed, although only if you have properly tagged music complete with album art.

Tagging is decent, you can search for media if it’s inaccurate. Performance is solid, but not stellar, especially once your music collection grows beyond the 8000+ songs mark. In fact I would say once your collection grows beyond 5000 tracks it becomes just to slow to browse in more then the list view, album art drags it down.

Perhaps the best all-round Media software, it includes photo, video, recorded TV and other media management. Unfortunately some of this functionality is totally superfluous, especially with Vista and Photo Gallery.

Unfortunately it is also buggier then it should be, with some persistent bugs, especially when tagging, becoming a real annoyance. The biggest single problem with Windows Media Player is that it no longer seems to have a real purpose.

It’s a great media manager sure, but who is it for? It’s not lightweight, those people will use VLC or something. iPod owners will use iTunes, Zune owners will use the Zune software. For organising recorded TV, Media Center does the job much better and would use it instead of Windows Live Photo Gallery for image management?

I guess we’ll see what happens with WMP in Windows 7.

iTunes

I must admit, I have very little experience using iTunes. I did try it out a little while ago, but I honestly got so annoyed at the Apple update software I uninstalled the whole thing (the Safari “update” did it for me)

iTunes is very popular, largely because of the connection with the iPod and iTunes Music store, and also because it genuinely is a well-designed, intuitive and useful application. In fact it possibly is the most popular music management and media software, in so small part due to the tight integration with the iTunes online store.

Significant features include the gapless playback, efficient, intuitive and minimal interface, Coverflow, automatic tagging, podcasting and auto-playlists.

One of the biggest iTunes complaints has been the auto-tagging, primarily dodgy support for music not part of the iTunes online store, somewhat unreliable album art downloading and Performance and stability have also reportedly suffered with recent releases, but I can’t give an opinion on that, what have you noticed?

Now I’d love to hear your opinions on both these, wether you use them or not. Tomorrow I plan to cover the major competitors to these two… MediaMonkey and WinAmp.

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Flock is one very good example and I’ve written about it on gHacks before. Songbird is another, and I have only just begun using this one myself.

I love the concept behind Songbird, and I like the software itself, unfortunately I think the biggest thing letting it down at this point in time is somewhat slow development. It’s not a criticism, but it does make it harder for Songbird to begin gaining a significant market share.

Version 0.6.1 offers some welcome improvements including support for 10 000 song libraries, performance enhancements, better media library searching,

I’ve been playing around with it for a couple days now, and while I’m not fully converted at this point, I’m seeing a product which looks extremely promising once it matures. If it can gain the kind of community which Firefox has then it has a very real chance of rapidly gaining rapid popularity. It’s greatest strength is that it can be extended like Firefox, although at this point it doesn’t quite have the sheer volume of add-ons, but as I said, creating a community will change this.

Considering the move towards cloud computing, online music streaming and always being connected Songbird is making innovative progress towards the kind of media player for the future. Windows Media Player is woefully inadequate for this kind of use, iTunes is too locked in.

It would be very much in stores like Amazons’ interest for this to happen as Songbird, unlike iTunes, offers song purchase choices to multiple online sites. Couple that with a iTunes-like interface and iPod support and we can say goodbye to DRM songs from Apple!

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Odeo is one of those sites that look crappy but offer so much to their visitors. Their extensive podcast directory is my number one reason to visit them. It is not all about technology or internet, you do find podcasts that cover politics, sex and business as well. You may pick one of the 14 categories and delve right into the immense variety of podcasts that can be listened to online or downloaded in mp3 format.
I know that you will head right for the sex category but let me give you information what Odeo offers besides the categories. You could start with the Odeo top 40 instead which is a listing of the top 40 podcasts at Odeo based on subscribers. Another option would be to take a look a the staff picks or use tagging to find the podcasts that you like. (tagging page looks messed up though)

The best thing about Odeo is that it does not force you to register at the site. Guests may listen and download the podcasts as well. Members do have some advantages such as being able to create personalized playlists and create favorites.

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The encyclopedia is currently not working with the latest iPods including iPod Nano and Video. I can see many uses for this. Students who have to write a test could very well use wikipedia for the latest information, it is also nice if you are a tourist and want additional information about an object in a certain town. Take a look at the screenshots below to see how this looks on the iPod.

I hope that the developer will release a new version soon that is compatible to my iPod Nano. It would take about 40% of the space but I think it is well worth it.

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